How secure do you feel when shopping for wine online? As Christmas approaches and with more and more people ordering online it’s definitely a question we should be asking ourselves.
With Bordeaux-Undiscovered you can be assured we take security to the highest level to keep you safe. As an independent online wine merchant we have been trading online for well over a decade and have been at the forefront of many innovations. Our customers’ security has always been of paramount importance to us. We are delighted to let you know that our site’s security has achieved an ‘A’ rated status.
What does it mean for you?
When you are browsing Bordeaux-Undiscovered take a peek at the browser bar at the top of your screen. It will show you our website address: https://www.bordeaux-undiscovered.co.uk/. The ‘https://’ is the important bit, it shows you that you are visiting a secure site. Most big companies online have ‘https://’ . . . for example if you bank online you will see it as a prefix to your bank’s website address.
Our ‘https://’ lets you know your details and transactions are safe. It’s an industry wide protocol but surprisingly a lot of online wine merchants and other shopping websites don’t have it.
If a merchants website you are visiting has a prefix of just ‘http://’, then their website is not secure. Other companies rely on their payment gateway to provide the secure connection and leave their web pages unsafe.
Given that you have to input your home address, phone number and date of birth to register for an account before you reach the payment gateway this is leaving you wide open to a threat should the website be hacked.
You will see that each and every page on Bordeaux-Undiscovered is covered by ‘https://’ so that your personal details are protected!
The padlock
We won’t bore you with techno babble but basically to gain ‘https://’ a website must have an SSL Certificate (SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer). SSL certificates are issued by a Certificate Authority (CA). You will also see a little padlock next to our website address.
If you click on the padlock you will see that our website is certified secure by the CA Comodo and that our connection to you is encrypted. This means that if somebody intercepts the communication between you and the website the data can not be seen in a readable format – all the interceptor would see is gibberish.
You can even view our certificate if you so wish by clicking on the link to open it.
Our ‘A’ rated status
This is something the online industry may not want you to know but you can check the security rating of any website you visit by using this free tool https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/. Type the domain name into the tool and it will analyse how secure the website is – this can take a while so be patient. You can try this with our website and you’ll see that we have an ‘A’ rating.
Ratings run from from ‘A – F’, with ‘F’ scoring less than 20/100 for security. The lower the score the more likely it is that the website in question has issues, is insecure and is vulnerable to attack.
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A = a score of more than 80
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B = a score of more than 65
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C = a score of more than 50
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D = a score of more than 35
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E = a score of more than 20
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F = a score of less than 20
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If a website is rated ‘T’ it means that they have ignored security issues and are not to be trusted.
So why doesn’t everyone have an SSL Certificate? Firstly, there is a cost involved in acquiring the necessary certificate. And it turns out that whilst it is easy to purchase an SSL Certificate, it’s not an easy job to configure your website and server correctly to achieve a high security rating.
To ensure that our SSL provides the necessary security, we engaged the developers Outerbridge who worked with us to properly configure our website and server. Their expertise gained us our ‘A’ status security.
This included making use of the very latest security protocols and ciphers, but just as importantly, they removed any old insecure protocols which are now considered outdated and/or vulnerable.
They also managed to apply all these security checks without slowing down the speed of the website, so that our customers benefit from a fast, and more significantly, a secure ordering and checkout process.
Of course, technology is always evolving, which is why it is a good practice to keep an eye on what happens in the world of security. Outerbridge also promptly apply updates as and when they become available so that our customers can visit our site any time with the full knowledge that they will always be protected.
So, as you can see, we not only put every effort into finding you ‘A’ rated wines but place the same amount of effort into ‘A’ rated security; giving our customers the comfort and knowledge that we are doing all we can to ensure every visit they make to our site is safe!
